on computer science and media topics

Getting Ideas… write a User Story

When I thought about an idea for a project, part of the lecture “Software Development for Cloud Computing”, I had two related use-cases in mind. So I wrote down those high-level user-stories:

As a user who owns a non-connected car, I want to access some information about my car on my smartphone so that I know about the position of my car and additional information like fuel level, consumption or driving statistics.

As an employee who wants to drive a pool-car, I want to know where the vehicle is parked so that I don’t have to search on different parking spots around the building.

The term autonomous war has been a controversial topic for years. But what exactly does the term actually mean? Autonomous war means the use of autonomous lethal weapons (short: LAWs) and machines or vehicles, which are primarily used by the military for modern warfare. Autonomous weapon systems can decide independently about life and death on the battlefield. However, autonomous weapon systems are more commonly known in the media as “killer robots”.

Motivation

Multi-Language Blog Navigation

The idea for this project occurred to me while I was listening to my sister share her vision for her recently started blog: To create a platform where writers of different ethnicity can publish texts in their native languages and exchange their stories with people from all over the world. Conquering the language barrier and making the texts available at least in the three most prominent languages – German, English and Arabic – requires the involvement of translators who are fluent in at least two of the demanded languages. Anyone who has ever attempted to make a translated text sound natural knows that this is no easy feat and can take up to many hours of finding the perfect balance between literal translation and understandable text.

This is where I saw room for improvement. Nowadays, machine translation tools have reached a decent level of fluency, despite not being able to capture the intricacies of different linguistic styles. Combining them with people who have a basic understanding of the source language can help speed up the process and reduce the effort considerably. Continue reading →

Overview

The users access the website where they have the option to the view the guest book, register or log in. To register the user has to provide a username, an email address and a secure password (more than 8 characters, upper and lowercase characters, numbers and special characters). Then an email with a verification link will be sent to the provided email address. Clicking this link will enable the user to login.

Upon login the user can post messages in the guest book, which will be saved to the MySQL database. In addition to a text message the user can also upload an image which will be transferred to an S3 Bucket, which in turn will trigger a Lambda. Here the image will be resized to make it suitable for displaying in the guest book and it will be transferred to another S3 Bucket and permissions will be set to make in publicly accessible. The URL to this image will also be saved in the MySQL database.

A few years ago, talking about Blockchain was largely consistent with talking about the technology behind Bitcoin. In contrast, Blockchain nowadays comprises a whole technology branch, whereby the Blockchain itself can be implemented in lots of various ways. Not a year ago, on December 17, 2018, the peak of the Bitcoin hype was reached by the breakthrough of $20,000 per coin. With the Bitcoin hype also, the hype around the Blockchain was further fueled. Consequently, we now have over 1800 Blockchain Platforms with Cryptocurrency listed on coinmarketcap.com. In addition, there are numerous frameworks and providers for so-called Private Blockchains, which are mostly used in companies and consortiums. Therefore, I’ll give an overview in this blog article of the current development in Blockchain as well as its chances and risks. I’ll also deal with technologies such as Smart Contracts, DApps, DAOsand ICOs, which are possible or have grown through Blockchain.

Imagine a student who just got up. He knows exactly that he has lectures today, but he does not remember which one or even when it begins. So, he asks his Alexa device: “Alexa, which classes do I have today?’” His Alexa device is able to look into his timetable and answers: “You have five lectures today. The first lecture is Digital Media Technology and starts at 8:15 am in room 011, the second lecture is Web Development and starts at 10:00 am in room 135, the third lecture is Design Patterns and starts at 11:45 am in room 017. You can see more lectures in your Alexa app.”

This scenario is what we had in mind when we started to develop an Alexa skill which should be able to tell you information about your timetable.Continue reading →

This project was originally inspired by a talk Felipe Hoffa gave at the Github Universe conference last year. He talked about how we can analyse the code hosted on Github at a large scale to learn interesting things. I’m always excited about learning new programming languages, at the moment my favourite new langue is Elm, a small functional programming language for building web applications. After watching the talk I thought it would be nice to do this kind of analysis on all the public Elm code hosted on Github.Continue reading →

Thinking of Trumps tweets it’s pretty obvious that they are controversial. Trying to gain insights of how controversial his tweets really are, we created tweets-by-donnie.

“It’s freezing and snowing in New York — we need global warming!”
Donald J. Trump

You decide if it’s meant as a joke or not.

But wouldn’t it be nice to know whether the public is seeing this as a joke or whether it’s getting upset by it? That’s where our idea originated from. By measuring the emotions presented in the responses we can see what the public is thinking of Trumps posts throughout the day.

For the Dev4Cloud lecture at HdM Stuttgart, we created a simple Go/NodeJS/React App, which helps people to keep track of often used words during presentations. In a presentation setting, most people tend to use too many fill words and to train against this, we want to introduce our presentation counter to you.Continue reading →